Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice (Addison-Wesley series in computer science)

Rating:
Summary: The thrilling story of how Smalltalk came to be.
Review: This book describes the process by which Smalltalk was introduced to people outside Xerox PARC, where it was developed.

This book first describes the incredibly exciting history of how Smalltalk was built from scratch. It then goes on to show the way in which Smalltalk was made public. At first, this was an engineering process. Large companies were contacted and offered to participate by porting the Smalltalk VM to their machines, and then running an image provided on tape.

Each of these teams then wrote a paper on their experience, and these original papers are included in this book. Xerox PARC also wrote its own paper.

These papers are an invaluable source of information for any Smalltalker. They range from overall design issues down to statistics on the work of the VM and image contents.

Chapters in this book were written by several people, including key people in the original Smalltalk 80 team that now is back at work producing Squeak...